Backgammon is the next big thing

HIGH-ROLLING Middle Eastern gamblers aiming to take your cash on the backgammon boards of cyberspace are the next big thing in internet betting, online giant PartyGaming predicted today.

Announcing better-than-expected first-quarter revenues of $342m (£194m), up 54% on the first quarter of 2005, PartyGaming finance director Martin Wiegold said the predominantly poker-playing website hoped online backgammon would be another new market to lure punters into cyber gaming
houses.

He said: 'We believe there is good potential in this game'

Releasing quarterly performance indicators, PartyGaming said its number of active poker players has risen in a year by 40% to 872,969, of which around a quarter come from outside the US. Its 50,000 active poker players in the UK make up around 6% of its business.

The technological brains behind PartyGaming software, Anurag Dikshit, 34, was today named as Britain's third-richest Asian with a fortune, mostly tied up in the company, of £1.7bn.

Dikshit, pronounced Dixit, graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi in 1994, and worked for a software developer in the USA the following year.

He met entrepreneur Ruth Parasol, and aged 25, was asked to create the programmes for casino games such as roulette. Parasol considered Dikshit's skills so crucial to the future success of the business, that she allocated him 32% of the shares in the company.

They launched Party Poker in August 2001, and cashed in on the booming interest in online gaming in America and Europe. The PartyGaming websites, which makes £500 a minute, proved so successful it had to update its technology to allow 70,000 gamblers to play online at the same time.The company floated on the stock exchange last year, turning Dikshit into a billionaire overnight.